Xenoblade Chronicles is a pretty good game until 2/3rds of the way through when it becomes the most boringest game ever.

It's also peak anime fake deep. Like in the way that it names characters after figures in Gnosticism and other religions and then just expects that to mean something on its own.

It was pretty great before it became super super boring though. The characters were all fun and they (mostly) played off each other well, the gameplay was super fun and interesting, and the game looks fantastic. It's in that category of wii games alongside twilight princess and last story and pandora's tower and some others that go for a semi-realistic style, but with some anime stylings and some really muddy graphics. It's definitely a look and a vibe, and it's a shame it was ruined by the incredibly ugly remaster that came out recently.

As for this port it's very bad. It runs well and is technically impressive, but god this game shouldn't be experienced on a handheld. This is a tv game and only a tv game. You lose so much out of the experience of seeing it on a large screen while sitting on a couch or whatever. So much that it ruins the game in a lot of ways. It really gets rid of that classic grand epic rpg feeling the story has.

Just emulate the Wii version and hook up your computer to the tv or put a rom on a hacked Wii instead of trying to play this port.

If only this game's gameplay was in any way bearable

This review contains spoilers

when i first played the game and saw the ending i cried so hard that i started dry heaving and had to get rushed to the emergency room bc my parents thought i was super sick, and i couldnt tell them that it was bc of the ending of a video game because i was scared that they'd yell at me bc i wasnt allowed to play my ds at the time

TearRing Saga: Berwick Saga: Lazberia Chronicles Chapter 174 is not only a fantastic name for a video game, but also one of the greatest examples of the greatest video game genre, the srpg. So total and utter in its execution to have momentum as a gameplay element in a genre that is often chided as "just chess, but if you found the rook hot." Not to be confused, of course, with the greatest example of the srpg as a genre, Banner Saga, where I DO indeed find the Rook attractive.

But this game has no need to have attractive characters, because it's all about the story. There's so much rng and diversity of strategy in this game that you'll be able to tell so many weird and wonderful stories with it, and really, that's all that matters when it comes to video games, or any art, really.

I assume that hell is just a never ending dota 2 match

For some reason this is the HM game I have put the most hours into. I remember spending literal years of my life trying to marry kai and failing. i even bought an action replay to try and cheat my way into marriage, but either i was too incompetent at hacking or giving kai 99 wine bottles and then reversing time to the beginning of that day to give him 99 more wine bottles over and over again until my save broke wasn't the way into his heart

this is easily the best katamari game

Breath of the Wild is a game of absolute extremes. It shows total understanding and mastery over the craft, but it also shows fundamental misunderstandings of them at the same time. It gives you so much and then tells you to put what it gave you aside. It is a struggle between game designs.

Zelda has always been a series of exploration. It has always known how to make you feel wanderlust even when you're exploring relatively linear worlds, but in most cases, that feeling was more aesthetic than actual, which is fine, of course, but Breath of the Wild sought to be able to give the most authentic sense of wanderlust a game can give someone. Now let's talk about how it goes about accomplishing that goal, the flow of the game, the gameplay loop.

In a word: contradictory. And not the fun kind. Self-sabotaging may be a better word for it, but Breath of the Wild portrays a very simple gameplay loop on its surface. You explore, you find something, you explore. But when that "something" is a shrine or dungeon, which it is most of the time, you run into issues. The biggest issue of Breath of the Wild. The dungeons, the second half to any Zelda equation, are horrid. There are 120 shrines dotted all around Hyrule and they usually hold one puzzle idea in each of them. Or they don't and you just have to fight something, or you just don't have to do anything, and the puzzle was getting to the shrine itself. This is awful and shows a basic misunderstanding of what dungeons do in Zelda games. Dungeons are never about a puzzle, it's about the puzzle of puzzles. Dungeons in Zelda are a collection of interlocking puzzles that in themselves form one puzzle. It is tedious and ruins game flow to be exploring the gorgeous open world only to be rewarded for that by being taken out of that open world into one of many homogeneous boring rooms to do a puzzle that is completely disconnected from everything else. What makes dungeons in Zelda so fantastic is how they work with the overworld. When I was going through Faron Woods in Skyward Sword, I was excited to see how this location's most pivotal point, its dungeon would be integrated with it, and Skyview Temple feels like something that I was exploring for. It feels like an ancient ruin deep in Faron Woods, it feels like part of the overworld. The shrines and even the divine beasts don't. They all look the same, and trust me, while it does look nice, seeing the same exact aesthetic over and over and over again with no major changes to it gets really grating when there's such a beautiful and diverse overworld I could be exploring instead. And when I overcome a shrine or a divine beast, I don't feel like I accomplished much. Instead of giving you an item half way through a dungeon, divine beasts give you control over one aspect of the beast once you get the map. This is so under developed and the dungeons aren't even that intricately designed that you ever need to use those controls in inventive or unique ways. And after you defeat the divine beast, instead of having a new tool that you could use to access more of the overworld like in most zelda games, you're given a spell that is either completely useless, barely noticeable, or a huge convenience that makes the other three spells look actively terrible in contrast. (I'm talking about Revali's Gale of course. In a game about exploration, the one spell that explicitly helps you do that is so obviously better than the two that are focused entirely on combat, and one that is just a recharging fairy.)

Oddly enough, these problems could be solved easily. Just have typical dungeon structure. Have around 9 dungeons sprinkled around the map and have them be traditional Zelda dungeons. When you first get to Lurelin village, have the locals tell you of the old abandoned temple that's on an island off the coast. Have a dilapidated old mine in Eldin where the Goron chieftain's father went to combat a great monster decades ago and never came back from, just anything that feels like it's part of the world and not some weird abstracted separate realm where nothing you do in it feels like you're exploring a part of the world you want to explore. They don't even need items in them or mini bosses or a map and compass like most Zelda games. Just a location in the world that feels like it fits where it is and isn't just home to the same reused assets over and over again. And have the puzzles have meaning. Have each puzzle in the dungeon come one step closer to unraveling the whole puzzlebox. I have no motivation to solve Breath of the Wild's puzzles. They mean nothing to me after I get my stamina maxed out, which is usually fairly early into the game for me, I might add. They don't mean anything if all they do is give you a heart piece. Heart pieces that have two loading screens you need to sit through in order to get it. They don't help unravel one big puzzle, they don't feel rewarding after you get all the useful stuff from them, and they all look the same and have no individual personality to them.

Now you may say that that's because the dungeons aren't meant to be as important as they were in previous Zelda games. I'd then ask why then they're absolutely everywhere. You can't go thirty minutes without finding one, and that's due to another of Breath of the Wild's contradictions.

I want to get lost in Hyrule. Nintendo wants me to get lost in Hyrule. It is then really annoying when they drag me out to make me climb a Ubisoft Tower. These towers are there to give you a mission when you enter a new region. They are huge, you can see it from all over the region it gives you the map of, which goes against the wanderlust of the rest of the exploration. When I wander, I want to wander. I don't want a giant glowing beacon to tell me that I need to get to it. This is baffling to me. Design wise it goes against exploration. You do not explore to find the Ubisoft Tower, you can see them from across the map. I think either you should fill out the map of where you've been, or there should be map merchants like in Majora's Mask wandering around Hyrule or at inns. They would then sell you a map, and the closer to where you currently are, the more expensive the map is. Or the map of each region should just be hidden somewhere in that region, and thorough exploration of the region would then be rewarded with the map. In a game about the whimsical mystique of exploring the worst thing you can do is give the players a map too early. And this leads us back to the shrines. The contradiction of Breath of the Wild I mentioned before that led to the shrines being absolutely everywhere is that they are your fast travel.

Having so many fast travel points in your game is baffling to me when the point of the game is to explore. It's saying that you don't think your world is good enough for people to want to see it a second time, which by the way isn't true. It's just another way this game's mechanics completely undermine its open world at times. You already have the stables, and they are all located in perfect locations to be your fast travel. Also I think fast travel should cost something. In a game where the main gameplay is exploring, getting to skip some of it should cost some currency. Which you can only make by exploring, so exploring, and exploring well, lets you skip some of it later down the line. I'm thinking carriages that take you to and from any stable in the game that is accessible at any stable.

But when this game lets you explore, it is breathtaking. I adore running through woods, stopping along the way to checkout a small cave, or a small abandoned shack in it. I love having to survive by hunting and gathering, I love having to constantly be scrounging up weapons, and I love when I discover something big. Be that a town or an old temple or a giant waterfall, it's all so masterfully crafted and truly does give me genuine wanderlust, it doesn't just imitate it. I love going to a stable, and hearing someone talk about a mythical horse roaming the nearby area, or have someone ask me to show them proof of the Great Fairy Fountain. But that's where the third part of the Zelda formula comes in. The sidequests.

Zelda games typically flesh out their world by having great sidequests. While most Zelda games don't have too many of them, they all have at least one quest in them that's remembered as one of the best in the series. Breath of the Wild has many sidequests. Many many more than Majora's mask even, which is THE sidequest Zelda game, but they're all so lackluster. There's no heart in most of them. This isn't helped by the game's equally lackluster cast. There is no Groose or Linebeck or Midna in this game. The closest is Sidon, who doesn't get enough screentime, and even then still can't match anyone from Skyward Sword. Or Majora's Mask. Or Twilight Princess. Or Windwaker. Or Link's Awakening. You get the picture.

The sidequests used to be what gave the overworld its life back in Ocarina of Time. When you first got to Kakariko in Ocarina of Time and saw cuccos running around and find their owner distraught over their escape it made the village feel like more than just seven polygonal houses and a windmill. It made it feel like people really lived in this village. Granted, those people never moved from their designated spots, but still.

Breath of the Wild doesn't need that. I don't need a sidequest for the game to tell me that people really live in Hateno Village, that's just self-evident from how they move around town and the town feels like it could really exist as a town, and not just an area for you to explore in a video game. But when I actually talk to people and do their sidequest and its all robotic and nobody feels like a real person, I am quickly reminded that I am not actually in a village with real people, but rather I am in an area that I'm supposed to explore because I'm playing a video game. Which wouldn't be so bad if that isn't what the game wants me to do, and likewise isn't what I want to have happen. Also like, the quests themselves aren't usually even that fun even if you are just treating it like a checklist item to do in a video game. Most of them just involve getting x number of items and giving it to the person that asked.

This game is very combat focused. Which is interesting, and the combat is very fun. The flow of it is basically the same as its been since Ocarina of Time, but with enemies that actually support the combat system like in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. It's fun enough, but whenever I'd have to fight a lot in quick succession, I'd end up very tired of the combat. It works best when you've been exploring for a while and come across a group of enemies attacking a fellow traveler, or get ambushed by a yiga clan assassin, which is good because it means that it's a mechanic that actually positively flows into the games main mechanic of exploration.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the exploration. And only the exploration of this game. Ignore the things in the game that work against it and give it its proper due, because I am truly in awe of it. Breath of the Wild's world is one that I want to get lost in, I want to wander. I see so many different adventures in the distance and get excited to have them. I love stumbling upon a secret hidden treasure chest, I love that when I get lost I am rewarded. I am rewarded with treasure and beauty and the thrill of adventure. I love finding a town and buying new equipment at its shop and spending a night at its inn and then going on my way off to another adventure. I love gathering up local ingredients and sitting down to cook them all into what I think would be the best combination of dishes. I love seeing the destroyed world of Hyrule and the history it tells without any text boxes, it is truly a masterpiece.

Just not one that you get to experience to its fullest.

This review contains spoilers

This chapter made me actually excited for chapter 3. It is so obviously a huge improvement over chapter 1, although the core problems with Deltarune chapter 1 are still there, namely how unimportant the dichotomy of mercy and attacking are, but hey, it's a dating sim now so what's not to like

This game is amiibo compatible and I just wanna point out that in this game if you scan the Lucina amiibo, you can have Fire Emblem Awakening's own Lucina, a princess from a grim future who's traveled back in time to stop the apocalypse and the death of everyone she's ever loved, walk into your shop and have you pick out the best oufit for her, and I think that's so cool.

This review contains spoilers

This is like one of the craziest games I've ever played

This game has atmosphere like a motherfucker, genuinely when it started off I loved exploring the hotel, it was a lot of fun and very cozy, then when the game wants the exact same hotel to be terrifying it is. The slow arduous journey from the chapel to your bedroom was the most tense I've felt in a long time. The game's sound design is also on point. Except for the weird end credits song. That kinda sucked.

Anyways, all that comes at odds with this game's baffling story which, as the rest of these reviews will tell you, is hilariously bizarre and also mostly about how cool pedophiles are. This game fucking SENT ME.

The voice acting is honestly so perfect for the dialogue. It's awkward and stilted and also somehow brimming with emotion. Like everyone voice acting was constantly on the verge of laughing while recording, or having a mental breakdown.

So right, you start thinking pretty soon into the game that the father is actually gonna be a misunderstood good guy, like everyone thought he was having sex with a 16 year old (or as this game keeps saying a 16 years-old), but he was just a genuinely understanding man who actually understood Rachel when nobody else did, and that relationship made say her dad or little brother jealous and so they started a rumor about the whole pedophile thing when in reality he was just the only one in the small town kind enough and smart enough to understand her and they had like a parental child bond, or like even a mutual friendship or something, but no, the dad is actually just an ethical pedophile and his dumb idiot prude wife just couldn't handle him experiencing so much love.

Also say that you're a woman and you find out your near-50 year old husband has impregnated a 16 year old girl. I'd say that the more rational response would be to kill your husband, not the 16 year old, but that's the game's final twist, and it's hilarious.

Most of this game's story is setting up a romance between the main character, Nicole, the daughter of the aforementioned ethical pedophile, and Irving, a character who is supposedly a FEMA worker, but in a reveal that was all too telegraphed turns out to be the little brother of the 16 year old, the titular Rachel. By the way there's a moment before the reveal where Irving pretends to be talking to someone else, but it's so incredibly obvious that it's just him doing the voice of an old lady so like, for a really long time I knew some shit was happening with him, and Nicole just doesn't realize that it was obviously him pitching his voice up a little bit. Once again, this game could absolutely send me. Also, that romance was actually kinda charming because of how awkward and bizarre the voice performance is, and genuinely I wish this game's ending was just them unraveling the mystery and then just like shrugging to each other and then leaving to go on the date they sorta set up. Like, man this sure was fucked up, but like idk at least we have each other. I don't know, I know there's some dialogue relating to their romance I missed so maybe I wouldn't like it so much if I had experienced it fully. Maybe it was because at that point their relationship was the only part of the game's story that wasn't a total dumpster fire and would've ended the game on at least something I liked.

The puzzles in this game are all basic and I never got lost, except for when I wanted to, like it's all there for a basic simple walking sim, and that's what it is. But everything else around it goes fucking crazy by the latter half, it's amazing.

I haven't laughed at a videogame this hard in so long, and I will say, even though this game is basically just 3 hours of defending the honor of a fictional pedophile, it really isn't that gross of a game. Maybe it's just because of how silly it all is, or maybe it is the voice work which made me laugh at all the big emotional scenes, but it plays out more like the devs being like "Oh, you fool, you thought the pedophile was a bad guy? He was actually the good guy and you were the bad guy for being mean to your classmate when you were a teenager!" Then some creepy person telling you about why age of consent laws are tyranny, like they only made the dad, once again, have sex with a high schooler, just so you'd be surprised when it turns out he was actually the good guy, and that's just kinda funny.

So this game hints constantly at the fact that Rachel is still alive or like is a ghost, but it never confirms it, like it should have, until near the end when it's revealed that yes, she is in fact a spooky ghost and can do spooky ghost things like possess people and write stuff on chalkboards. This is very very funny, and also is so stupid and ends anything this game could've done that was remotely good. Like they would talk a lot about how love stays within the hotel's walls, or like Rachel is still with us, and you think it's metaphorical, but no it's all literal and the game ends with Rachel possessing Nicole and trying to kill herself, because she thinks Nicole killed her? Rachel calls Nicole her murderer near the end even though she isn't. Thinking about it, you do get the keys to your mom's car, who was the killer, right before that, so you think that her writing "murderer" on a chalk board was referencing your mom, but no she does try to kill Nicole at the end. I don't get it, but the game demonizes Nicole for being mean to Rachel when she was 16 and also for paying more attention to her Hockey Finales then to if her mom was present during parts of that game, which is hilarious, like most of this game's plot, but man does it really suck how this game had the potential to be unironically good, but now can only be enjoyed entirely ironically.

The setup is decent, the characters are poorly acted and poorly written, but incredibly charming mostly because of those two things, but then the game had to go and defend pedophilia. You don't ever come back from that.

All in all this is the most insane game ever made, and I think it may be the most perfect fit for "so bad it's good" or whatever you want to call it, but of course I completely understand how subjective art is and that this game surely isn't for anyone.

Never after finishing a game has my head been full of so many thoughts, it's like a shotgun just went off in my brain. Like, why is this game? Why would you make this game? Who would make this game? How did this game develop into what it currently is?

I'm not tagging this review as spoilers because it honestly doesn't matter and I think that already knowing how silly and awful this game is before going in will only enhance your experience. Play at your own risk. Seriously. What the FUCK is this game.

This game doesn't have any mighty b rep in it and that's unforgivable

I played the arcade mode twice and like, I still am having a hard time figuring out how it's different from just playing a random cpu match, and I played like an hour of the online play, and I feel like I've experienced everything I'll get out of this game. I've only played as korra so far and I intend on keeping it that way because she's the only character that looks fun. Her moveset is mostly just "lul no, fuck you" and I mean disrespecting with her moves on online was fun I guess, but over all this game really just needed more development time. And more server space evidently because I only experienced one lag free match and had one match completely die on me while playing online.

Cartoon Network Punchtime Explosion is by far the better game, even if its gameplay may not be as good. It has a fun story mode where all the characters you know and love act in character and interact with one another which is the point of a crossover, and it has a much larger roaster and even has weird terrible minigames during its story mode, like at least that game felt like it had some thought put into it.

This game, while it is fun to constantly deny the other player doing anything as Korra, sucks. There's nothing to do in it, you don't unlock any characters, you don't unlock any extra features that matter, literally the only reason this game exists is for the raw gameplay, which makes no sense considering this is a game that is a crossover of a bunch of beloved characters and Oblina, who gives a shit about the gameplay, I'm here for spongebob, but nothing "spongebob" happens in this game, there's some stages based on spongebob, spongebob and patrick and sandy are in the game, but there isn't anything spongebob about those elements, especially since there isn't cutscenes or unlockable conversations or some shit, listen man I just want to see the funny characters be funny.

Idk, I spent an hour and a half in this game and only as one character and I already feel like I got out of the game everything I'm gonna get out of it.

you guys need to cool it with saying everything looks like studio ghibli, if anything this game felt like watching a gobelins film (and stylistically looks like half of all gobelins films tbh), especially in its tone and its general theming and atmosphere and presentation, so basically all of it. This game really feels like a gobelins film.

But like gobelins, this game is quite short, which is good, and something so rare in this medium which is understanding how much time a game is worth. This game is simple and wants to tell you a short story and there's nothing wrong with that, that is infinitely more preferable to having it drag on longer than it should for sake of "content". Like there isn't enough content in the game already for it to be fully enjoyable and get across to you every emotion it wants to.

I just finished this game as of writing this, and I keep going back to everything in the game, stuff that I didn't get or otherwise stood out to me, and after putting them into the broader context of the rest of the game, not only do I understand them completely, but appreciate them greatly. Everything in this game is designed so expertly, the pacing the story the mechanics (besides the last puzzle that was really finicky), they all flow together perfectly and there's never a frame in this game that looks ugly, there's never a moment in it that goes wasted, and there's really nothing else I could seek to add to it, it is wholly and completely, well, complete.

I have an immense love for video games that take design seriously, the idea that you don't just need game design and stuff like replayability to make a good game. That games aren't just gameplay mechanics, they're stories, stories which are expressed cooperatively through an audiovisual medium. To ignore the design of how the camera can sit in every map in the game, or how the loading screen can sometimes separate the experience of playing a game into something akin to vignettes, actually taking into account the cooperate storytelling aspect of video games and designing the other aspects with it in mind and it with the other aspects in mind and the other aspects with the other other aspects in mind as well. It's something incredibly difficult for any piece of art, and especially hard for a video game to do, but it is always something to admire and love when a game even attempts to do it.

"Henry Tudor is my name. But I find it tiresome. You may call me Yugi." is such a raw line you'd think it came from Shakespeare but no. It's from Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses.

I keep telling my friends the funny joke that the only ps5 exclusive content I've experienced after owning one for half a year is FFVII Remake Intergrade, only to remember around roughly 30 minutes later each time that this game exists and that I bought and played it, which really goes to show how much of an impression it left on me.

Literally nothing made my heart sink more than when I switched to... Rivet? Is that her name? for the first time and her weapons and ammo were the exact same as Ratchet's was at the time. This game would have actually been good despite it's insanely boring story if only the two protagonists were different in any real and important way. Like, the fact they share one arsenal, first off, doesn't make any sense, and secondly, is probably the biggest missed opportunity in this whole series. It really did drain all my interest in the game immediately once I found that out. Usually games don't get ruined just by one mechanic or one design decision, but this one turned what was to begin with a mediocre Ratchet & Clank game into the worst one I've ever played.

Why even have two protagonists if you aren't gonna utilize it at all?

Also, within 5 minutes of gaining control, I got softlocked on the moving platform that takes you to the first battle of the game. Then, during the riding section, I keep going out of the intended play area and just had a blast trying to find the most glitchy piece of collision. This game feels so incredibly half-baked.